You might have heard that the stock market, the Dow specifically, took a pretty ruthless beating from itself yesterday. Homeboy dropped, like, 500 points. I hear on the news that I might be affected by that in some way, but thinking about it analytically would really kill my "Charles In Charge marathon" buzz I've been cultivating as of late. So instead of actually looking at any raw data, listening to any other opinions, or even clicking on the online news headline which I'm now looking at, I'm going to explain why I believe that the announcement by the Magik Markers of a March U.S. tour not only affected, but directly caused yesterday's substantial losses.

First, I would like to invoke the idea of "chaos theory." Having seen Babel, 21 Grams, and Amores Perros, I don't think it would be immodest to call myself an expert on the subject. It might even be an understatement. In a nutshell, chaos theory is the idea that anything has the potential to influence anything else. For example, after reading Kobak's review of Lambsbread's Stereo Mars, you decide to go and pick up the album from a record store. While there, you meet someone and fall deeply in love. The two of you have a child together, who grows up to unite the globe, at long last, under an everlasting world peace. In a very indirect way, your reading of TMT brought about world peace. Therefore, it wouldn't be far off to say that by not reading the site every single day, you are actually causing global injustice. I might have taken a few liberties with the details, but you get the idea.

By the same token, the announcement of a Magik Markers tour earlier this month must have come as quite a shock to club owners, who have since been scrambling to prepare their venues for the aural onslaught that the Markers are sure to bring with them. Could this, in turn, have led the club owners to take out additional insurance policies, expecting their stages to be rocked to pure rubble? Did this pique their interest in the world of actual investing and cause many of them to rent the Charlie Sheen movie Wall Street to brush up on how the game is played? Did news of all the extra Wall Street rentals get out, making insiders on the real Wall Street overly cautious, anticipating a market takeover, leading to the crash we saw yesterday? Also, the RIAA was probably involved, but I'm not sure exactly how. Regardless, in this case I believe the facts speak for themselves. You could draw your own conclusions, but don't that sound like an awful lot of work?

In other news, word of the Police's decision to reunite was the cause of Fidel Castro's return to good health: